A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

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Saturday, August 23, 2014

DILETTANTE ALERT -- SERIOUS STUFF BELOW

Recently, this blog has been rather intensely focused on Marx's
economic theories and his claim that there is a tendency in capitalist economies
for the rate of profit to fall.Today I
should like to turn my attention in a quite different direction, to the
philosophy of Immanuel Kant.In the
course of paying a personal tribute to the half century anniversary of the
publication of my first book onKant's philosophy,
I made some rather bold claims about what I accomplished in that book.Emboldened by the absence of snarky responses
in the Comments section [due perhaps to the fact that everyone was wrapped up
in the Marx-debate], I shall today undertake in a very lengthy post to reprise
what I think is my most important contribution to our understanding of Kant's
theories, namely my argument that the deepest conclusions of Kant's theoretical
philosophy -- his epistemology, as we would call it today -- undermine and
contradict the core theses of his moral theory.The argument, which I have made in several places not much noticed by
the scholarly world, is, to the best of my knowledge, original with me and has neither
been anticipated nor commented upon by any other Kant scholars.This is going to take me a while, folks, so
if Kant is not your thing, now would be a good time to catch up on your
FreeCell or Spider Solitaire or watch those back episodes of House of Cards that somehow escaped you
when they first came out.

Speaking broadly, Kant began his philosophical career committed
to defending the fundamental claims of both science and ethics.Science, for Kant, meant the Newtonian
Physics of his day, with its universal causal laws governing the movements of
bodies in space.Ethics meant the rigorous
demands of the particular form of Protestantism known as Pietism, which, as
learned at his mother's knee, emphasized the absolute bindingness of the
demands of reason and the importance of resisting the temptations of sensuous
desire.To these two tasks Kant brought
the version of metaphysics that he had learned at university from his teacher, Martin
Knutzen, who was a follower of Gottfried Leibniz.

There were many well-known difficulties and disputes in the
so-called Rationalist school about the relation of physics and mathematics to
the claims of metaphysics, and Kant's first serious effort to resolve those
disputes was laid out by him in 1770 in the form of his Inaugural Dissertation,
a formal presentation on the occasion of his elevation to the Chair of Logic
and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg.In brief, Kant's idea was to assert that
there were two cognitive sources of knowledge -- Reason and Sensation [or
Intuition, as it was called then.]Reason, he argued, gives us knowledge of things as they are in
themselves -- knowledge that, roughly speaking, is the substance of Leibnizean
metaphysics.Sensation, or Intuition, on
the other hand, gives us a somewhat less robust knowledge of things as they
appear to us under the forms of Intuition, which are space and time, this
latter knowledge comprising Euclidean Geometry and Newtonian Physics.

Almost immediately after presenting the Inaugural
Dissertation, Kant became aware of the powerful sceptical arguments of David
Hume, which, be it noted, were directed precisely against the causal inferences
of Newtonian Physics, as well as against the sorts of arguments advanced by Leibnizean
metaphysics.Kant understood that Hume's
arguments, if not completely rebutted, would destroy the defense he had erected
of Newtonian Physics, and leave him with nothing but an utterly unacceptable
scepticism.Kant withdrew his hastily announced
plans to publish a "Critique of Reason" and embarked on a feverish
decade long rethinking of everything he had until then taken for granted, an
effort that resulted, eleven years later, in the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason [1781.]

During this period of the most extraordinary philosophical
effort, Kant had always in mind his desire to defend the fundamental claims of
Ethics.Indeed, during this same decade,
Kant seems to have worked through, in his mind and in some cases on paper, a
complete philosophical position that made a place not only for his defense of
Newtonian Physics, Euclidean Geometry, and Ethical Theory, but also for
radically new theories of aesthetics, of the concept of teleology, of law and politics,
and even of religion.

The key to the entire enterprise was the distinction, taken
over from Plato and incorporated already into the Inaugural Dissertation, between
Appearance and Reality [or, to use the terms of art that appear in the Critique, between Phenomena and
Noumena.]In the course of working out a
response to Humean scepticism, Kant gave up for all time the claim that we can
have knowledge of independent reality, of things
in themselves, to use the phrase he coined.[Autobiographical aside.The
German for "thing in itself" is ding
an sich.When I bought a tiny
motorcycle in Oxford in 1954 and drove it to Rome, I called it the "ding
nicht an sich" because, I said, it was a phenomenal motorcycle.Oh well.I was only twenty.]

Thus, Kant rejected completely all the claims of Leibnizean
metaphysics.In doing so, he had clearly
in mind his desire to defend the truths of morality, to resolve the apparently
irresoluble conflict between the determinism of physics and the freed will
presupposed by morality.Classical
physics says that everything happens according to immutable causal laws, and
morality demands that we act freely.Kant
thought that by limiting our knowledge to the realm of Appearance, he had
carved out a separate sphere, the sphere of things in themselves, in which
Reason and Freedom could reign, in which the laws of morality held with
absolute unconditional universality and necessity.

It is very important for everything I am now going to say to
form some sense of the fever in which Kant must have worked for those eleven
years, constantly trying to keep track of and find a place in his argument for
the enormous range of subjects on which he was forging new doctrines.[Biographical aside:An early hagiographic account of Kant's life,
published shortly after his death, describes him as much distressed in his last
years because he could "no longer bring the full force of his intellectual
powers to bear on his philosophical work."When I read that, I thought of the monster in the old Frankenstein movie
with sparks coming out of his head like an enormous Tesla Coil.]To hold it all together, Kant devised a
framework, or architectonic, as it
has come to be called, with a place for everything, and everything in its
place, all organized according to Kant's schema of the cognitive faculties of
the mind:Reason, Understanding,
Imagination, Sensibility, Will, and so forth.Indeed, so prolific and indefatigable a schematizer was he that he
actually elaborate a number of not entirely compatible schemata -- at least
three in the First Critique alone.This framework, the architectonic, served to
help Kant keep track of where he was in the elaboration of his arguments.

Now, if Kant had merely been one of the most important
philosophers ever to live, the unfolding of this grand scheme, eventually set
forth in a Three Critiques and a raft of other books, would have been enough to
immortalize him.Lord knows, the rest of
us would be blissed out at the thought of producing something that is even a
bare shadow of this grand scheme.But
Kant was even more than this.He was
capable, as he worked on the spelling out of his grand plan, of seizing on key
elements of the argument and diving below the surface, following the train of
his intuition as deep as it took him, no matter how he was forced by the logic
of his investigation to change long held and much cherished philosophical
beliefs.I think of him at these moments
as being like Gandalf the Grey, who followed the Balrog into the deepest reaches
of the Caves of Moria and did battle there, emerging triumphant but changed, as
Gandalf the White.

Just such a moment occurs in the Transcendental Deduction of
the Categories in the First Critique.As he dives deep into the analysis of the
Concepts of Understanding, in an effort to combat Hume's scepticism and defend
the knowledge claims of Newtonian Physics, Kant is guided by the belief, laid
out in the structure of the Architectonic, that the Categories of Causation,
Substance, and the rest are class concepts that have hypothetical, or as we
would put it, problematic application to things in themselves.This allows him to say that although they can
never yield knowledge of things in
themselves, since that knowledge requires Intuition, or Sensibility, which is
constrained by the mind-imposed forms of Space and Time, nevertheless we can
still form coherent meaningful propositions about the actions of things in
themselves, among which are morally free persons.Hence, he believes, he has made room for
morality by limiting knowledge.

But in the depths of his investigation, Kant finds that
Categories are in fact rules for the synthesis of a manifold [or manyness] of
sensible intuitions.And since the Categories
are rules for the synthesis of a manifold, they
cannot have even problematic application to something that is not a manifold of
intuition at all, which is to say they cannot have even problematic application
to things in themselves.Only
insofar as they are understood as rules for the synthesis of a manifold do the
categories serve to undergird our knowledge of physics.

In short, in the process of solving the problem of finding a
response to Hume's scepticism, Kant has
in fact left no room at all for ethics, for the rational laws of morality, for
the Categorical Imperative.

BUT KANT NEVER SEEMS
TO HAVE REALIZED WHAT HE HAD DONE IN THE DEPTHS OF THE DEDUCTION, FOR ONCE HE
WAS FINISHED WITH THAT ARGUMENT, HE WENT BACK TO THINKING IN TERMS OF THE
RELATIVELY SUPERFICIAL ARCHITECTONIC BASED ON THESES THAT THE ARGUMENTS OF THE
DEDUCTION HAD REFUTED.

If there is anyone at all left reading this, let me give you
some examples to illustrate the problem Kant has fashioned for himself.First of all, Kant's pre-philosophical notion
of the human condition is that it is a ceaseless struggle between duty and
inclination, between what we know we ought to do and what we would like to do.Not all philosophers see ethics this way, of
course.Plato and Aristotle see ethics
as concerned with discovering how to live the good life, where the phrase
"good life" is deliberately and intentionally ambiguous -- the good
life is both a virtuous life, a life well lived, and a truly happy life.The struggle between duty and inclination
makes almost no appearance in Greek ethics.Bentham and Mill thought the paradigmatic ethical problem was the
"hard case," a situation in which competing and conflicting claims
require us to figure out, taking everything into consideration, what will be
best for all.Their solution is to
convert moral deliberation into a calculation, a summing up of pleasures and
pains according to some general guidelines for weighting them and so
forth.Neither of these is Kant's idea of
ethics.Kant does not think that the
central human problem is how to be happy, nor is he especially worried about
hard cases.He thinks that everyone --
including a peasant in North Prussia where Kant lived -- knows what is right
and wrong:Tell the truth, keep your
promises, do unto others as you would have others do unto you.When readers of his ethical writings
protested that the Categorical Imperative was just a fancy version of the
Golden Rule, Kant agreed, and said that since we all know what is right, you
would hardly expect a moral theorist to tell you something new!

Now inclination is a form of desire, which, like everything
else in the realm of appearance, is causally determined [by physical or
psychological forces, it matters not which]. Our rational will, which struggles
against inclination to do what is right, is a power of the noumenal self, the
self as thing in itself, unconstrained by physical laws and hence free to
submit itself to Reason, not to Inclination.This endless struggle between the phenomenal self with its inclinations
and the noumenal self with its reason, is the defining situation of the moral
life.Purely noumenal beings -- angels,
let us say -- would experience the Moral Law in roughly the way that we
experience the laws of mathematics, as rational principles that, as rational
beings, they naturally and freely obey.But because we humans are, in the immortal words of Alexander Pope, "placed
on this isthmus of a middle state, being[s] darkly wise and rudely great,"
we, unlike angels, experience the rational principles of morality as imperatives.Hence, the Moral Law appears to us, but not
to them, as a Categorical Imperative.[Imagine, if you can, a mathematician who finds herself tempted to draw
conclusions not implied by her premises, and who must steel herself to obey modus ponens against the sinister forces
of inclination.]

But this familiar story of reason resisting temptation,
which is quintessentially the Kantian problematic, if I may speak à
la franҫaise, is absolutely impossible according to the
deeper teaching of the First Critique.Within the realm of appearance, there can be
no such conflict between the noumenal will and phenomenal inclination, because
any willing of the noumenal self must make its appearance in the space-time
continuum of Phenomena as causally determined by what went before, just like
everything else.

Let me say that again, because it may be difficult for those
of you who have studied Kant's philosophy in the usual manner to appreciate
just what has happened here.The
successful refutation of Humean scepticism achieved in the deepest passages of
the First Critique rests on an
interpretation of space, time, inclination, and will that makes it absolutely
impossible for the phenomenologically observed torments of the devout Pietistic
Protestant to be correctly interpreted as a struggle between reason and Inclination,
between Freedom and Determinism.In
short, Kant's epistemology appears to imply that his moral theory of
impossible.

I say "seems" because there is in fact an
available resolution of this contradiction, which though incredible is
genuinely logically possible.[I am not
going to lay it out here, because this is going on entirely too long, but if
anyone is interested, I will explain in the next day or two.]But alas, that is only the least of it.There is another problem bequeathed by Kant's
epistemology to his ethical theory that is a genuine crusher, and I turn to
that now.

Everyone will agree, I take it, that for Kant telling the
truth and keeping one's promises are clear, unambiguous examples of moral
duties.Now think about it.To whom do I tell the truth?Another person, presumably, another rational
agent.It is to that rational agent that
I have a duty of truth-telling.The same
is true of keeping one's promises.I
make promises to other rational agents, and it is to them that I owe the duty
to keep my promises.Thus it follows
trivially, according to Kant, that it is possible for me to encounter other
rational agents in experience, to whom I owe a duty of telling the truth,
should I choose to speak to them, and to whom I owe a duty of keeping my
promises, should I make them.To be
sure, I do not have a duty to speak to everyone I encounter, or promiscuously to
scatter promises about the landscape like rose petals at a wedding.But should I speak to someone else, I am
obligated to speak truthfully, and if I make a promise to someone else, I have
a duty to keep it.

Suppose we take seriously the deeper doctrine of the First Critique.According to that doctrine, the realm of
Appearance, with its laws, is a construction of the synthesizing ego, which in
its activity is guided by innate rules for the synthesis of a manifold of
intuition, rules that Kant calls Categories of Understanding.Now, one of the darkest and most difficult
teachings of the Critique is that the self knows itself only as it appears to
itself, not as it is in itself.[That is, if I am not mistaken, virtually a direct quote.I do not have the Critique in front of me.]This self is the synthesizing self, the rational self, the noumenal
self.Indeed, it is the moral self.All of these are the same self in its
different functions or actions or manifestations.

In other words, the moral self that wills the Categorical
Imperative appears to itself in the realm of experience as a conditioned,
desirous, historical self possessed of inclinations and temptations.But now perhaps you see the problem.What
is the self to whom I owe this duty of promise keeping and truth telling?To whom am I making a promise when I promise?The answer must be, it can only be, that this
is a another noumenal self, another moral self, different from me, whom I am
encountering in the realm of appearance.

But the realm of appearance is, so to speak, a story that I,
the noumenal self, am telling to myself -- myself, the appearance of that noumenal
self.How on earth can another noumenal
self show up in my realm of
appearance?If I may put it this way,
how can another author show up in my story?

The deep arguments in the First Critique by which Kant manages to refute Humean scepticism
are inherently and ungetoverably solipsistic in their implications.This does not pose any crippling problems for
Kant's understanding of Newton and Euclid, but it is fatal for his conception
of the moral condition.

To the best of my knowledge [I hope readers who are more
clued in to recent Kant scholarship will correct me if I am wrong], I am the
only Kant scholar who has ever pointed this out.How can that be?Well, a simple answer is that almost no Kant
scholars write full-scale commentaries on the First Critique and also write full-scale commentaries on the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
-- except for me.

6 comments:

Might your insight have ramifications for Freudian theory? Equating the noumenal self with the unconscious, so that we may have an oblique relationship thusly with ourselves, or am I getting things confused?

In papers in the early 70's I argued that Hume's own efforts to explain the relationship between experience and the experiencer ends up in a nearly identical disaster. Within empiricism he cannot "get to" (experience) the self as an experiencer who is having experiences. Nor "get to" any other experiencers of the kind he thinks "the real he" is. Thus, on the epistemological side the distinction between Continental Rationalists and British Empiricists pretty much collapses. None of them can "peek behind the veil" of phemonmena or experiences to experience that there are others mit Dingen an sich, that they are more than mere images on a (my) screen. (Of course, even 'screen' itself becomes problematic.) Now I wish I, too, had gone on to examine the implications of that for Hume's moral theories. Huzzah for you for doing just that with Kant.

Thank you for this illuminating post. I'd be interested in the follow-up you mention; at the moment I'm coming up short as to how it'd be possible, so it's intriguing.

I'm also curious to understand why you say Kant successfully refuted Humean skepticism - I had understood that Kant was trying to rebut what's now called Hume's metaphysical argument on induction (is this mistaken?), but the induction literature largely takes for granted that that "metaphysical" argument (perhaps not the best word for it) was successful.

(1) In short, Kant's understanding of the appearance/reality cut is contradictory when it comes to fitting the physical and the ethical together. I know that leaves out nearly all of it, but let me put it this way so as to explain the second thought.

(2) An often mentioned metaphor or allegory for the appearance/reality cut is Plato's cave. So, why is it that the contradiction in Kant's understanding doesn't have a counterpart in the cave allegory? If there is no counterpart, what has to be added to get the analogous contradiction?

(3) The relation between the noumenal ethical self and the phenomenal physical self is similar to the counterpart relation between objects in different possible worlds. Socrates in one world is F, but in another, he is not F. The conundrum is how to understand how it could be that it is the same Socrates that is and is not F. The Kantian conundrum is how to understand how it could be that Socrates is a causally caught up object and yet also a free agent. If there is an way to understand the modal case, isn't it clear that there should be a similar way to understand the Kantian case?

(4) This similar way to understand the Kantian case is adumbrated in your point about how the author of one narrative can't, or perhaps can, appear in another author's narrative. A narrative picks out a set of possible worlds. Suppose that the characters of our respective narratives pick out objects that are identical in the way that the Socrates who is F is identical with the Socrates is not F. To borrow a phrase, they are transworld characters. What is needed to resolve the contraction, in sum, is an understanding of how the same thing can have contradictory descriptions such as causally networked and free, but expressing the problem in terms of narrative already points the way to a resolution? This may be Robert Howell's point, by the way; I never made it through his book....

JR, maybe I misread your question, but is that not the point with Hume? That starting from empiricism, he reaches a position of complete scepticism on not only he real existence and behaviour of what we experience, but also of the experiencer? He does say that there is a stream of consciousness, but that we do not even experience (let alone know) a 'thing' where this stream could be taking place. And as dar as I know, Hume's ethics makes no metaphysical claims, remaining in the world of phenomena.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.